When a major global education organization picks a city in North Africa as the site of its conference, that’s a sign that something important is going on. It doesn’t happen often. When it does, it usually has effects that go far beyond booking hotels and making plans for keynotes.
The fact that Rabat was chosen to host OMEP‘s 2027 World Annual Conference is one of those small events that has a lot of meaning behind the scenes. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP) has worked for many years to connect researchers, teachers, and policymakers who care about the rights and development needs of young children. The most important work in the field is presented and discussed at its yearly conference. It’s not just a matter of getting the group to Morocco. It’s a message.
Francophone Africa has a long history of producing thoughtful teachers and dedicated researchers who work on early childhood issues. What it has often lacked is being talked about in international academic settings. The networks, funding streams, and citation trails tend to move more easily through institutions that speak English or that are based in Europe. A conference in Rabat, some of which will be held in French, changes that area in small but real ways.
Take the OMEP New Scholar Award as an example. This program has been going since 2020 and has the support of the Korean National Committee. Its clear goal is to bring in early-career researchers from all over the world and help younger scholars in the field connect with each other. People from China, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, Spain, Japan, Latvia, and Malta have won. The geographical spread is real. The number of Francophone Africans has been low, though, if you look closely. It’s easy to see why—participation needs knowledge, access, and sometimes just being sure that the door is open for you.
Having the conference in Rabat in 2027 changes some of that. Doctoral students in Morocco, researchers in Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire working on early childhood curriculum, and teachers in Cameroon keeping track of preschool outcomes are all closer than ever to this conversation in terms of both geography and language. That closeness is important. Changes in who gets published or funded probably won’t happen all at once. But it makes it easier to get involved, which is where most changes begin.
There is a real benefit to the New Scholar Award itself. A graduate student can get $500, and a researcher who is less than five years away from earning their PhD can get $1,000. The amounts aren’t very big. It’s not so much the prize money that’s valuable, but the chance to present at the World Annual Conference and connect with people from Uruguay, the UK, Australia, and other places. You never know when a young researcher from Morocco or Tunisia might decide not to submit an abstract because they can’t get to the information they need close to home.
Seeing how these international education groups change over time makes me think that the field is really trying to include more people in choosing its questions and outcomes. That goal is reflected in the research topics from the last few award cycles: traditional Japanese play and executive function, child-restricted spaces in South Korea, and how children in Malta think about the environment. These are specific questions that have to do with culture. Africa that speaks French has just as many important and interesting questions to ask. What does multilingual preschool look like in places where French is the official language but not the first language? How do arrangements for care change in West African cities that are growing quickly? Just how much do kids in the Sahel really know about their rights?
That’s not all that Rabat will be able to answer in 2027. But it could be the place where more researchers feel ready and happy to start asking them.
